How Long?

I think I have not slept since I was 12 or so. What I have done night by night is something other than sleep. I have lain down for a moment, hidden myself, escaped for a time.

How long since a morning has simply come upon me, wandered in through the window at its own leisure? How long since it mattered what the robin and the bumblebee had to say? What has become of the kisses of my mother, of the ease of joy, of the daily conspiracy of every thing and every creature to remake the hours in all the fullness of purpose?

How long since life has mattered like that?

There comes a time--who knows how or when--that finds both waking and sleeping diminished, a time wherein what is merely memory is found to have superseded miracle.

And the loneliness is enough to kill.

My life becomes a continual hungering after that which has already been swallowed and digested. What food can there be in the world for the feeding of empty spaces?

Time passes, and does not make us wise. Time passes, and in its passage we become more and more what we have made than what we are. What is left of original essence is found in the teardrop, contained in the blank stare, wrapped up in the fitful dream.

Nausea

There are these times, these days and hours, wherein ones very soul seems suddenly to have gone dull, enveloped in an inexplicable though not the less pervasive sense of drudgery. It feels either that you cannot wake up or that you have finally awakened. You find yourself in your car, on the road, radio playing tunes from the 70s, the same road, the same car, going to the same places, and the old world washes over your shoulders, bends your back forward in the flow.

And suddenly you can barely continue. You feel like pulling over to the side of the road. Where were you going, and why? Is that the same beggar on the corner there? The same as yesterday and the day before? The same cardboard sign? And there, just ahead, the supermarket, the Starbucks, the Burger King, the video store.

It has all crawled inside you, curled up next to your liver, toes poking one of your lungs. What happened? I was feeling fine, and then . . .

You find yourself alone, so alone that this state of only-ness inside you has grown its own identity, separate yet the same--you are known by it, it is known by you. The presence of the thing is suffocating, overbearing.

Jean Paul Sartre, in one of his novels, called it nausea.

I prefer to call it a lie.